Re: greenhouse-tomatoes: heirlooms

["Paul A Cross" <charybda@newmex.com>]

greenhouse-tomatoes - an email list for growers of greenhouse tomatoes.
Sent by "Paul A Cross" <charybda@newmex.com>.
-

I know of one grower in Colorado doing organic heirloom greenhouse tomatoes.
He roots the pruned suckers from good heirloom stock plants to fill out a
house with heirloom clones, since the genetic variability in the heirlooms is
too great to grow out from seed. To make the clones, he takes a sucker and
strips off all but one leaf and the growing tip, and roots the cutting in
soilless media.

Heirloom clones sound like an interesting strategy. Anyone else out there up
to that? It would seem to me that you'd probably have to be running at least
two houses staggered, so you could plant out in one house the clones of the
good plants from the other house.

I can recall him reporting that for him, yellow brandywines do well, while red
brandywines do not. When I asked him about what varieties worked well for him,
his response was that everyone's conditions are different, so people just need
to trial varieties in their own houses. He did mention that for his organic
production, heirlooms were more productive for him than the modern greenhouse
hybrids. He mentioned growing cherokee purples.

I have seen some very beautiful german stripes greenhouse grown, but those
guys were not keeping enough records to know what the productivity was.

Paul Cross

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rick Snyder" <RickS@ra.msstate.edu>
To: "Greenhouse Tomato List" <greenhouse-tomatoes@Lists.MsState.Edu>
Sent: Monday, November 07, 2005 2:45 PM
Subject: greenhouse-tomatoes: heirlooms


> Is anybody trying heirloom tomatoes in the greenhouse?
> If so, what varieties have worked / not worked for you?
>
> Rick